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Hana Westerman
Atlantic Monthly Press
January 2023
On Sale: January 10, 2023
336 pages
ISBN: 0802160603
EAN: 9780802160607
Kindle: B09MDJBTVQ
Hardcover / e-Book
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Thriller Serial Killer | Thriller Police Procedural
A tenacious Māori detective, Hana Westerman juggles single motherhood, endemic prejudice, and the pressures of her career in Auckland CIB. Led to a crime scene by a mysterious video, she discovers a man ritualistically hanging in a secret room and a puzzling inward-curving inscription. Delving into the investigation after a second, apparently unrelated, death, she uncovers a chilling connection to an historic crime: 160 years before, during the brutal and bloody British colonization of New Zealand, a troop of colonial soldiers unjustly executed a Māori Chief. Hana realizes that the murders are utu—the Māori tradition of rebalancing for the crime committed eight generations ago. There were six soldiers in the British troop, and since descendants of two of the soldiers have been killed, four more potential murders remain. Hana is thus hunting New Zealand’s first serial killer. The pursuit soon becomes frighteningly personal, recalling the painful event, two decades before, when Hana, then a new cop, was part of a police team sent to end by force a land rights occupation by indigenous peoples on the same ancestral mountain where the Chief was killed, calling once more into question her loyalty to her roots. Worse still, a genealogical link to the British soldiers brings the case terrifyingly close to Hana’s own family.
Hana Westerman BETTER THE BLOOD
#1.0
β’ January 2023
 RETURN TO BLOOD
#2.0
β’ May 2024
 CARVED IN BLOOD
#3.0
β’ July 2025
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